


maybe sprout wings

by lupinely



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, [looking at bbc merlin seasons 4 and 5] gwen sweetie im so sorry, aka my ode to gwen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:27:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25731346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: In the days after Camlann, Gwen waits for Arthur and Merlin to come home.
Relationships: Gwen & Merlin (Merlin), Gwen/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 59





	maybe sprout wings

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote 100k of merlin fic last year but none of it was from gwen's point of view. this fic was long overdue. this is a fic about gwen, but also about gwen and merlin, because to me their friendship remains the heart of the show in many ways, and the show itself forgot that, i think.
> 
> title from "maybe sprout wings" by the mountain goats. you can find me at ursulaleguins.tumblr.com if you like.

Gwen takes the ring that Gaius proffers to her. Holds it up to the light. It flashes, in that way she knows so well.

Arthur is dying, and she holds the royal seal of Camelot in her hands.

It amazes her to see her hands so steady, shaking not at all.

Gaius tells her about Avalon and Merlin’s hopes for what they will find there, about a dream and a myth that might save Arthur’s life. Gwen almost laughs when Gaius says it. She almost says that Arthur would never submit to this willingly. But it is Merlin’s idea, Merlin’s hope. Arthur would submit to that, even now.

_Do I know him?_ she asks Gaius about the sorcerer at Camlann, the magic wielder who turned the battle’s tide. But of course she already does. She has suspected since before she married Arthur, long before, and she thinks now that this suspicion which she so long refused to acknowledge was a cover, a false veneer concealing a deep knowing, kept hidden even from herself.

Once—it feels like a long time ago, but it isn’t, not really—Merlin was Gwen’s closest friend. She had been close to Morgana, of course, very close (oh, how long ago now!) and her feelings for Arthur, even then, had been strong. But she and Merlin had been equals, both servants, both outsiders in their own ways. How many times could she have been there for him and wasn’t because she didn’t know, because he had needed to hide this truth so well? How many times could he have been there for her and wasn’t because he had needed to keep himself apart to stay safe?

She is surprised that the thought brings not just sorrow but resentment, deeply felt. At Merlin, but not wholly. At Arthur, but not completely. At them both, for all the times that they kept counsel together, traveled together, adventured together, kept secrets together, all while leaving her behind and presuming that she did not know any better, but she did.

She loves them both. What was she to say?

She hopes that Arthur apologizes to Merlin for everything. She hopes that he thanks him. She hopes for that much, at least. And she hopes that Arthur thinks about what he would say to her now if he had the chance. But he isn’t going to get it.

Maybe he will, the most desperate part of her whispers. Maybe Merlin is right and Arthur will be healed, and they will return together and the circle at Camelot can be made whole again. Maybe Merlin will still bring Arthur home.

Maybe. The look on Gaius’ face—mingled pity, grief, exhausted despair—tells Gwen that he believes that as much as she does.

Arthur is a poor sleeper, always has been. More often than not he tosses and turns the night away, only to finally fall asleep a few hours before sunrise and sleep until most of the morning is gone, if not the beginning of the afternoon. Gwen knows this isn’t a new consequence of being king because she remembers how Merlin would complain, years and years ago, about how nonresponsive Arthur was in the morning, how hard it was to drag him out of bed. “He’s doing it on purpose,” Merlin grumped more than a few times after bundling Arthur off to a council meeting with his father and coming down to the kitchens to find Gwen.

“Maybe you should just let him sleep through a meeting.” Gwen was joking, but Merlin looked at her as if she had grown a second head or said something in the language of the old religion. He was always like that, and she didn’t think that he realized it—he would complain about Arthur until night passed and morning came, but as soon as he thought that anyone else was seriously agreeing with him, he turned immediately defensive on Arthur’s behalf. Gwen supposed that she was the same way. Though perhaps a bit better at hiding it.

“And let Uther roast him for supper?” asked Merlin.

“I’ll tell the cooks to expect a surprise entrée tonight,” Gwen said, straight-faced, until Merlin finally realized that she was taking the piss and laughed with her.

Arthur’s sleep habits seem to improve in the first few months after he and Gwen were wed. He is all too happy to go to bed when Gwen does, and he falls asleep more easily, after only maybe an hour or so of restlessness (through which Gwen usually manages to doze, and which she only endures because she remembers how much Merlin used to lament Arthur’s sleeplessness). They find a routine that becomes so familiar that she begins to wonder whether Merlin had been exaggerating after all. She gets ready for bed and Arthur follows her, they make love, they lie there together afterwards and she kisses his cooling forehead, smoothes back his hair, and he holds her close and sometimes even drifts off to sleep before she does, which before she would have thought was impossible.

One night even finds their positions reversed. Arthur dozes in a chair by the fire while Gwen stands at his desk, looking at the pages of troop reports and border patrols and knight’s training schedules. Several little villages to the south have been dealing with raiders for the past few weeks, and nothing has yet been able to stop their attacks. Gwen does not realize what she is doing, this obsessive poring-over of Arthur’s scrawled notes, until he comes up behind her and puts his arms around her, his chin resting on her shoulder.

“Guinevere,” he says, “my love. My dearest. My sweetest and most gentle angel—”

She inhales, laughing, and jabs him with her elbows.

“—my lovely, sharp-elbowed wife.” Arthur presses his face against her hair and laughs. “It’s very late.”

“You know how ridiculous that is coming from you.” But she turns, still in his arms, and puts her own around him.

“I am aware of the irony, yes.” She feels him breathing for a moment and knows that he is looking over her head at the papers sprawled across his desk, disturbed from where he had left them several hours ago. “It’s not your job to solve this, you know,” he says after a little while, very quietly.

She pulls away, unaware that she had meant to do that. “I was trying to help.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No.” He surprises her at times like this, his deep unflinching steel. How many times has he turned away from her, unable to speak about whatever was bothering him, so that she has had to wait hours or days to learn what was on his mind? Yet now he looks back at her plainly, his face open and honest. That’s what drew her to him in the first place—what always brings her back. That sincere, almost naïve earnestness. “I value your insight. Hell, you’re more perceptive than half the advisors on my council. But you don’t have to take this on your shoulders.”

Her injured pride ebbs. “Aren’t I queen?”

He takes her hands in his. “Yes.”

“Then let me be queen.”

He smiles. “You don’t need my permission for that. But it’s late. There will be no new insights tonight.”

She smiles back, and lets him wrap her up in his arms again. “Now where have I heard that before?”

“Someone wise once told me that, I think. Someone wise and very beautiful.” He kisses her.

A little while later, as she is drifting off to sleep, Arthur begins to snore lightly in her arms. She smiles; kisses his hair.

Their comfortable routine does not last. Months after their wedding, as they approach their first anniversary, Arthur’s sleep worsens again, grows restless. He stays up half the night pacing, and when Gwen asks him to come to bed she feels him lying awake next to her while she falls asleep. She wakes a few hours later to see him sitting at his desk in the early morning with no candles lit, reading his notes by the thin light of the dawn through the window. Soon enough she stops asking, because she understands. She lets him do what he has to.

Now, in the days after Camlann, alone in Camelot except for Gaius—even Percival and Gwaine have gone, and no one knows where to—Gwen is the one who cannot sleep. She hasn’t gotten more than a few hours’ worth since Gaius returned without Arthur and Merlin and told her where they were going.

“You need to rest, Gwen,” Gaius says to her one evening when he catches her in the hallway outside the royal chambers. Not _your highness,_ not _your majesty_ —Gwen. It is a relief to hear her name and not a title. She wants to hug Gaius for it, and doesn’t. “There are potions I could brew to help you sleep.”

She knows that, remembers Morgana taking them years ago when her magic was manifesting and she too could no longer sleep easily. Gwen wonders how she sleeps now. “Did Arthur ever take any of them?” she asks, but of course she knows that he never did.

Gaius looks at her unhappily and says nothing. How many times has he had this conversation over the years: with Morgana, with Arthur, with Merlin, and now with her? How many young people has he seen suffer, sicken, die? Gwen feels sorry for him for it, though that feeling mingles with her confused resentment, the knowledge that Gaius has protected Merlin all these years—for which Gwen is grateful, profoundly grateful—and yet he never spoke out against Uther openly, never challenged him. Let him execute her father for magic and apostasy when Gaius surely knew that Tom and hundreds of others of Uther’s victims were innocent, had done nothing.

Yet she is still glad Gaius is here.

“You mustn’t lose hope,” Gaius tells her. “Merlin will bring Arthur home.”

Gwen takes his hands in hers and squeezes them, feeling tears sting at her eyes. “Thank you, Gaius,” she says. “For everything.”

He produces a small vial from one of his pockets. “Here. I know you won’t use it, but you should hold onto this anyway, just in case.”

She accepts it, thinking: how well you know us, Gaius. How well you know us all. “Thank you.”

He nods, then takes his leave. For a moment Gwen stands there in the hallway outside the chambers where she has lived with Arthur for the past three years of their marriage, the chambers that were his all his life as crown prince, for he had ordered the real royal chambers, Uther’s chambers, be used as storage after Uther’s passing. She stands there and feels Arthur’s absence, the swell of it like a wave inside her, and she listens to the silence of the castle, everyone in the city waiting for news of their king, sickening with it, despair growing like a vast fungal thing between them all.

If he dies, she tells herself, I will feel it. I’ll know.

She wishes Merlin were here. It is a two-pronged thing, that wish. Because Merlin is where he needs to be right now, with Arthur. But Gwen thinks: you were my friend first.

She never wanted to be queen. For some reason this baffled Arthur—not that she didn’t want it, exactly; that much made sense. But that she should be so resistant to it, so opposed to the very thought. Of course Arthur had been born to be king, and the matter of his role in life had never been called into question. If he ever had doubts about it—and Gwen knew that he did—he never spoke of them to her. As far as she knew, he never spoke of them to anyone. Maybe Merlin, once or twice. But even then no more than that.

Gwen does not know what she was born to be. She thinks, maybe, that she was not born to be anything.

And she thinks that she prefers it that way.

Gwen doesn’t sleep much anymore because when she does, she dreams. Since Elyan died, she has dreamed every night. She wakes up shaking, cold with sweat, and feels Arthur press his arms around her and hold her close. Part of her wants to push him away, screaming _your father killed my father and your sister killed my brother,_ but she doesn’t. They never talk about it, but Gwen thinks that Arthur knows what she is thinking in those moments when she wakes shaking and he holds her until the nightmare passes. It’s not his fault. And Gwen’s bitterness towards Morgana runs deeper than maybe Arthur even knows, or knows how to understand, in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with who Gwen and Morgana once were, long ago.

You thought you were trapped, Gwen thinks. All the things that she would say to Morgana if she had the chance surface in her thoughts belly-up like fish that have died and begun to rot. You thought you were trapped, and now look at how you’ve trapped me.

For all Morgana’s self-righteous fury at her own subjugation in the iron fist of Camelot, she has no qualms being that same cold fist to others. Not anymore. Any true understandings that she once had of mercy, of justice, of truth are gone, burned out from within. Her prison now is one of her own making.

Gwen sits cold and unmoving in the chair by the unlit fire in the royal chambers, her knees drawn to her chest as outside the sun begins to rise on the third day since Gaius’s return to Camelot. If Arthur dies, she thinks, I will find you, Morgana. I will find you and I will kill you, or I will die trying. I promise you that.

Learning how to be queen had been an adjustment. To go from serving girl to banished exile to queen of Camelot in only a few months was a whiplash that she thought for a long time would never stop stinging. It took her more than half a year to be able to ask any of the servants for anything. Most of the time she still did whatever needed doing by herself, until her own maidservant, Eleanor, demanded that Gwen stop and let her do her job.

“But I know how to do it,” Gwen said when Eleanor took the tray of dirty dishes from her hands and turned to bring them to the kitchens herself.

“Yes, I know,” Eleanor said. “And I appreciate that you probably know how to do a lot of these things better than I do. But I’ll never learn if you don’t let me. And you’re the queen of Camelot now.”

Gwen laughed despite herself. “Do you know how strange it is to hear you say that?”

Eleanor smiled, gently. “I can imagine.”

After that Gwen let Eleanor do her job mostly unchallenged, but the strangeness of it never really went away. Gwen almost talked to Merlin about it a few times. She thought that he would understand. But ever since Arthur had been crowned king, Merlin had been distant and anxious and far away, like there were things that he was preoccupied with that he couldn’t and wouldn’t share. Once or twice Gwen even wondered whether Gaius might be sick, or something like that, but he seemed as vital as ever. She decided not to press Merlin if he didn’t want to share what was on his mind. She decided to give him time.

Besides—Merlin had Arthur to talk to anyway, didn’t he?

Later of course she would realize that of course he didn’t, and that she had made a mistake. But it had been a mistake that she and Merlin made together. And by the time that she knew that, it was too late to change any of it. Too late for them, and too late for Arthur.

If Merlin were here right now, and she in his place instead, Gwen thinks that he would understand how she feels better than anyone else ever could. She hates him for it. She loves him for it. God, how she misses them both.

The night before the battle at Camlann, Arthur tells her not to be afraid.

“I’m not afraid,” Gwen says, and finds that it is the truth. Only later, when she is lying in bed with Arthur’s arms around her, does she think to ask Arthur whether he is.

He hesitates for so long that Gwen wonders whether he has actually miraculously fallen asleep after all. Then he says, quietly, “Yes.”

She turns in his arms and holds him close. “Why?”

“What's happened to her is my fault.”

“Morgana?” Gwen says, surprised. “No, it’s not. She made her choice as we made ours. As you made yours.”

“As Uther taught us both to do,” Arthur says, bitterly.

“Maybe so. But Uther has been dead a long time, and Morgana has been out from beneath his thumb for even longer. Whatever righteousness she may have possessed at first is long since gone. Everything she’s done has been by her own design for a very long time.”

Arthur is quiet again for a moment. “Maybe you’re right.”

“I am,” Gwen says. “But I understand why you feel the way you do. Sometimes I feel it, too. Sometimes I think I could have helped her somehow. Like I owed it to her.” She laughs a little.

“After what she did to you?” Arthur asks. “To Elyan? No. Never.”

“I didn’t say it made sense. But sometimes it’s how I feel.”

Arthur hugs her tighter. “I know what you mean.”

She kisses him. “I know you do.” Then she hesitates, wondering whether she has the courage to ask about what she knows is also on Arthur’s mind. She finds that she does. “You’re not just thinking of her though, are you?” The words pull splinters from her lungs. She wonders if this is how it is for Arthur all the time.

Arthur says nothing.

“It’s all right,” Gwen says, even though she thinks that it probably isn’t. She rests her head against Arthur’s shoulder, listening to the beating of his heart. “Merlin will be all right.”

Arthur swallows, once, and stays silent.

Later, when she has nearly drifted off to sleep, she feels Arthur shift beside her. “I love you,” he whispers quietly into her ear.

She turns her face to his and kisses him. “I love you, too.”

The next day, the world splinters. Breaks.

Gwen laces up her riding boots in the early morning light, having finally slept a little. When she stands to leave, she holds her hand over her cloak for a moment, hesitating. Then she goes to Arthur’s wardrobe and digs through the clothes inside. She finds his old riding cloak stuffed in the back. She pulls it out, touches the worn wool gone threadbare in the shoulders and around the clasp, and then lifts it and presses it against her face. Arthur hasn’t worn it in so long that it no longer smells like him, smells only of mothballs and dust. After a moment she pulls away, two damp places left in the wool, and settles the cloak around her shoulders.

Sneaking out of the castle is easy. The city is quiet, waiting for news of its king. She takes her horse from the stables and heads north. She will be back before anyone even notices that she is gone. She isn’t going far.

The lake to the north of the city lies placid and quiet, heavy with mist. Gwen leads her horse away from its edge and picks her way over to the place where she pushed the boat bearing Elyan into the water before the archers set fire to it. She stands there for a moment, remembering, before she realizes that she is too close to the water’s edge and the lake is seeping into her boots. She takes a step back and thinks, you’re already wet. You could swim out to him.

The unbidden thought, as if it came from someone else’s mind, unsettles her so badly that she turns her back on the water and stands there trembling.

When her composure returns, she starts to walk along the shoreline, bending every now and then to pick some of the bluebells and violets growing at her feet. She walks nearly a third of the way around the shore until she finds a large fallen tree, half-decayed, and sits in the curve at the base of its trunk where the roots ripped up from the ground, years ago. She holds the flowers in her hands and looks out over the water, listening to the sound of it against the muddy shore, the birds the only speaking things in the woods around her, muttering their early morning songs. The sun still has not fully risen, and the woods are filled with a thin light that gets lost in the mist above the water.

“I miss you,” she says. Her hands tighten around the flowers’ stems, and she has to force herself to stop so that she doesn’t tear the flowers apart. “I really, really miss you.”

She blinks against the tears filling her eyes. She presses one hand against her face. “Dad would have been so proud of you.” She said that before, at Elyan’s burial, when only she and Arthur had been left at the water’s edge, watching the distant smoldering remains of the boat. Arthur had put his arms around her then and held her, but something in his posture had been wrong. She knew without asking that he was thinking of Uther, and how he’d had Gwen and Elyan’s father killed.

When Arthur banished her—which is a hurt that still aches deeply whenever Gwen so much as thinks about it—Elyan had begged her to let him come with her. But Gwen hadn’t been able to allow that. Elyan had finally found his purpose in life: a direction, a calling. She didn’t want to be the reason he gave that up. He had said that between that calling and her, it wasn’t even a choice. She’d smiled, sadly, and hugged him.

“Stay,” she said. “For me.”

And so he had. She still doesn’t know whether that was the right thing to do. But it had felt like it, at the time.

When she finally returned to Camelot, Elyan had been waiting for her at the city gates. He threw his arms around her and hugged her for a long time. He was crying, but she wasn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have gone with you no matter what you said. I’m sorry, Gwen.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s over now.”

And for a little while, it was.

She sits by the water for a while without thinking. Feeling only the distant warmth of the slowly rising sun and the touch of the gentle breeze against her face. Elyan found his calling at last, yes. And it hadn’t mattered in the end. He’s still gone. She’s still here, alone.

She wonders what Arthur said when Merlin told him that he was a sorcerer. Surely Merlin must have told Arthur by now. She thinks that she can guess—can see the look on Arthur’s face as clearly as if he were standing before her now. She laughs, a little bitterly. My god, Merlin, she thinks—how did you stand it? All these years, how could you stand it?

“You could have told me.” She says it aloud as if that can make it true. But could he have? Maybe if she hadn’t married Arthur. Hadn’t married him and stood by him these past three years, saying nothing when he spoke about the evil of magic even though every single time it made her think of Uther having her father killed in his indiscriminate thirst for blood. She wonders how much of Uther’s vendetta was truly fueled by his distrust and hatred of magic and how much of it by his simple, unswerving need for someone’s neck to fill the noose.

There were times when Arthur did remind her of Uther, strongly so. He and Morgana both, though both of them would have refused to hear it. Gwen never said that to Arthur, because it would be cruel and only partially true. She also knows and has always known that, in the ways that matter most, Arthur is nothing like his father ever was. He is a better king. A better man. And he would have been a better father, too.

Merlin must also have thought so. Why else would he have stayed and endured what he did, this long past decade of secrecy?

If Merlin had told Gwen his secret, would she have told Arthur? No, she tells herself fiercely. As hard as it would have been to keep something from Arthur, as painful, she would have done so for her friend. But Merlin couldn’t have known that for sure. Maybe, even now, neither can Gwen. And after ten years, keeping the secret probably became easier for Merlin than telling the truth.

Gwen realizes that she is crying, though she is not fully sure why. For Elyan, or for Arthur? For Merlin, her once dearest friend whom she removed to arms’ length because she had thought that it was what she needed to do for them both? For herself, the last of them all, sitting at the lake where she buried her brother, who was murdered by someone who was also once her friend?

She is crying a little for Morgana, too, though it hurts to admit that. Morgana was also hurt, set on a broken path by Uther’s cruel lies, his half-given love for her conditional upon her obedience to him. Gwen pities Morgana, hates her for the path that she chose even while she feels her heart breaking for the young woman she used to be, whom Gwen once loved.

It strikes Gwen for the first time since she learned Merlin’s secret just how clearly he and Morgana stand in contrast to each other. Morgana chose violence and revenge; Merlin chose secrecy, a life lived in silence. Gwen does not envy either of them the choice. Uther’s shadow is long and dark over them both, though it warped and bent Morgana more because of her relation to him, the father who half-raised her and half-loved her.

Arthur lived under that shadow, too, and it led him to do things that he shouldn’t have, to maintain animosities that should never have existed. And maybe Gwen, the one of the four of them who felt Uther’s influence the least, should have known better. Maybe she could have done something more.

With one hand she reaches inside the pocket of her riding trousers and touches the cool silver of the royal seal of Camelot. It warms slowly to her touch. Then she wipes the tears from her face and stands.

The sun has risen over the treetops now, and the day is getting hot. She’s been gone longer than she intended. She makes her way back to where she left her horse, careful in the mud, the mist burning away in the sunlight around her as she walks until none is left. She is still holding the flowers, though already they are starting to wilt.

At the place where she pushed Elyan’s boat off from the shore, Gwen places the flowers at the lake’s edge, their stems in the water as if the lake were a vase and not a graveyard. Slowly, as she breathes deep, her tears slow and then stop. “I miss you,” she says again. “I love you.”

Then she gets onto her horse, and goes back to the city.

She meets Leon at the city gates, though he is heading in the opposite direction. He is going quickly, his horse at a trot, but he pulls the reins to the side and slows to a stop when he sees her. “Everyone’s been looking for you.” He sounds like a reproachful older brother and not the head knight of Camelot addressing the queen, which makes Gwen bite the inside of her mouth to still a sad smile. Leon seems to realize it too, and he adds somewhat awkwardly, “Where did you go?”

“The lake.”

She sees that he understands at once. Any reproach left in him melts away. “Ah.” He pauses, like he doesn’t know what to say. “How was it?”

“Quiet,” she says. “Peaceful.” She knows that Leon visits there often, as well as the small graveyard to the north of the city where markers have been placed for other fallen knights. “I didn’t mean to be gone so long. I lost track of the time. Is everyone...?”

“Panicking?” Leon smiles. “Maybe a little. I’ll send someone to let everyone know there’s nothing to worry about. Can I escort you anywhere?”

Gwen almost laughs at the formality in his voice. “The royal chambers, I suppose. I haven’t eaten anything yet today.”

They return their horses to the stables and head for the castle, walking in silence. Leon has been a knight of Camelot for as long as Gwen can remember; in fact, as far as she knows, he is the longest-serving knight still in the kingdom’s employ. Arthur told her once that he trusted Leon more than he trusted himself.

And, when Arthur banished her, Leon had stopped Gwen on her way out of the city and told her that if she never needed anything, she knew how to reach him. It was a promise tantamount to treason. Gwen never told Arthur about it. She had been such a mess of grief and rage at the time that she did not fully realize the depth of implication of what Leon had said until weeks later.

She doesn’t think that Leon’s offer was borne out of any greater love for her than he bore for Arthur; she wasn’t even queen, then. Instead she thinks that Leon grew accustomed, long ago, to disagreeing with the decisions of the king, and that he knew that sometimes true loyalty could be found in dissent rather than unquestioning obedience.

“I’ll be all right,” she remembers saying to him then, though she hadn’t known whether that was true or not. “Just...look after Elyan for me, won’t you?”

Leon looked at her with compassion and sympathy. “I will,” he promised, and he had.

And now here is Leon again, still looking after her, the way he looked after Elyan and all the other knights; the way he looks after Arthur. The well of his compassion is, Gwen knows after all these many years, very deep.

“Thank you,” she says when they reach the royal chambers.

Something in her voice must have told Leon that she meant that for more than his act of escorting her here. “You are very welcome, Gwen,” he says, quietly, and he bows deeply to her.

She enters her and Arthur’s shared chambers with tears in her eyes.

A week passes. A few more tepid, listless days.

Gwen paces their chambers, wondering whether her feet will leave pathways in the stone floor that will remain long after she and everyone she knows are gone.

Then someone knocks at her door. Somehow, without knowing how or why she knows but only that she does know it, unavoidably, Gwen knows that it is Merlin, and that he is alone, and that he will look at her from across a shared chasm of grief so wide that it may drown them both.

She stands. She feels, despite it all, calm. “Come in.”

Merlin opens the door. He does not enter the room but lingers in the doorway. He is alone, and he is watching her, and he does not speak. Gwen has rehearsed this moment a hundred times since Gaius came back and told her what Merlin was attempting to do, but now that the moment is here she does not do any of the things that she thought she would. She does not cry, or scream, or weep, or slam the door in Merlin’s face, or hurl herself at him and half-attack, half-clutch at him. Everything that she imagined had been so much more dramatic than what she does do, which is stand there and look at him silently. She hardly feels anything at all, in this first initial moment: just emptiness.

I didn’t feel it, she thinks. I didn’t feel you die after all, Arthur.

Merlin is exhausted, his boots dirty and wet, his hands scraped and scratched. Gwen does not know what to say to him. What do you say? What does anyone say, in moments like these? “Sit down,” she says at last, because it is something.

Merlin shakes his head. “I won’t keep you long.” He pauses. “Gaius gave you the seal?”

“Yes,” she says quietly.

Merlin nods. “He died nearly a week ago.” Matter of fact. “Six days ago, actually. We reached Avalon, but we were too late. I don't know how, but Morgana found us. I killed her. We don’t have to worry about her anymore."

This is the first thing to shock Gwen. “You killed her?”

“Yes.” Merlin watches her. Gwen cannot read his expression, but she has the feeling that he can read hers. “You seem....”

“Disappointed?” says Gwen. “Maybe.” She had told herself that if Arthur died, at least she would still have her revenge for his death. She had imagined herself waging righteous war against Morgana, the killer of Camelot’s king. At least, should she be the sole regent of Camelot, she could have had that. Something to focus on. A foolish hope, a stupid dream; why wish for war when you could wish for peace, which Camelot has not know in a very long time? But the fantasy of it had had staved off the sharpness of her grief and made it bearable. Now there is nothing else left. “I should have been there.”

“It was both of our hands on the sword,” Merlin says. “I thought of you. You were with me.”

Again, something she had not expected. Gwen turns her back to Merlin, overcome and hoping to hide it just a moment longer. Tears prick at her eyes and gather and then fall down her face, hot and fast and seemingly unending. “Did Arthur think of me?” she asks shakily.

She hears the sound of Merlin moving behind her, the door closing finally on the empty hallway. Yet Merlin does not approach her. “Of course he did,” he says quietly. “Very much.”

She closes her eyes; takes a shaky breath.

“He...he wanted me to tell you that he loves you. More than he could ever say.”

Her mouth twitches. “’Loves?’”

“He still does,” Merlin says. “Wherever he may be, now.”

Gwen turns, no longer pretending to cling to composure. Merlin stands passive, his expression the same, that bone-deep tiredness that will not, Gwen thinks, go away with sleep. The tremble in his voice when he speaks next is the only thing that betrays what he feels. “I’m sorry, Gwen.”

“Yes,” she says; “I am, too.”

She hopes that he knows what she means by that—all of it. But she doesn’t think that he does.

“You should find Gaius if you haven’t already,” she says at last. “He’s worried sick about you.”

Merlin nods, half-bows. He turns to leave, then stops. “You don’t....”

“What?”

He hesitates. “You must know the truth about me, now.”

“I do.”

He meets her gaze. For a moment, both of them know all the things that they have for so long neglected to say.

“Go and see Gaius,” Gwen says, gently; and Merlin does.

When Gwen sleeps that night, her sleep is restless, broken; but she does not dream.

She never wanted to be queen. Now she is a queen without a king, the sole ruler of Camelot, the royal seal worn on a chain around her neck, hers to wield. It rests close to her heart, just like Arthur does.

She never wanted to be queen but she thinks that she can be a good one. She has witnessed Uther’s atrocities and Arthur’s mistakes. She saw what happened to Morgana and what Morgana did in the name of trying to claim the throne of Camelot. Gwen is one of the last of her friends still standing. Arthur, Elyan, Lancelot, Morgana, Gwaine—they are all are gone.

But she is not alone.

She goes to Gaius’s quarters late the next evening. When she knocks and Gaius answers the door, he does not say anything. He takes one look at her face and stands aside to let her pass. She goes to Merlin’s room, hesitates. Then she lifts her hand and knocks once more.

Merlin answers, bleary-eyed. He doesn’t look as if he has been sleeping well either. He looks smaller, thinner, and shocked to see her standing there. His expression turns guarded as he waits for her to speak, and the distance that they’ve let grow between them becomes almost insurmountable.

Resentment and love wrestle inside Gwen. They have done so for a long time. She resents Merlin for how close he and Arthur were—that he got to be with Arthur in the end, to hold him as he died, and she did not. She loves Merlin because he was there for Arthur in his final moments and because he was and is her friend, and she has never once questioned the depths of his devotion or the goodness of his heart. She hopes that, if she could ask, he might say the same about her.

Resentment and love, bitter tenderness. In the end, love wins out. She always knew that it would.

“I wanted to thank you,” she says when she can speak. “For trying to save him.”

Grief flashes across Merlin’s face. “You shouldn’t.”

“But I will. I want to. Merlin....” She reaches out and takes his hands in hers. He lets her, though he stands otherwise stiff and unmoving. “I wanted to thank you for loving him.”

He says nothing. Tears gather in his eyes and then fall. He twists his hands in hers and she thinks that he will pull away from her, but instead he does the opposite. He clutches her hands close instead.

“I should thank _you,”_ he says shakily, “for the same.”

She smiles through her own tears. “He made fools of us both, didn’t he?”

Merlin laughs a little. “And we’d let him do it again.”

“We would.” She pauses, then gathers herself for what she came here to say. “There is something I want to ask you. But you don’t have to agree to it.”

He waits, watching her.

“Will you help me?” she asks. “Help me be queen. I want to do what’s right. I’m not sure what that means yet, or what it will mean in the future, and that’s why I want you to do it with me. But I know one thing, at least. I want to make magic free in Camelot. I want you to help me do that.”

Now Merlin does drop her hands. Pulls away from her. His mouth works, but he doesn’t say anything.

“You don’t have to answer right away,” Gwen says. “And I will understand if you don’t want anything to do with the throne of Camelot anymore. But I wanted to ask you.”

“I’ll help you.” Merlin’s voice comes out as a rasp. He is staring at her like he doesn’t think she’s real, like he thinks that he might be dreaming. “Gwen, I....”

“Don’t you dare thank me,” she says. “Not for this.” She puts her arms around him, and they hold each other close for a long time.

Later, when she returns to the royal chambers— _her_ chambers—she touches the ring on the chain around her neck. She misses Arthur fiercely. Missing him feels so immense that she thinks that if she fell into the pit of it, she would never hit the bottom. Grief wraps itself around her shoulders like an embrace. A cloak that she will wear the rest of her life.

But that life is still hers to live. And there is so much left that she is going to do.


End file.
